I'm back!
After almost six months of (unpaid) work on the Byte Me! Festival, I'm back on deck with creating the rest of TC.
For the record - I'm making it at a printable, albeit small, resolution. Printed cards would be around playing card size. By making it this small, I massively increase the number of images I can use in the deck's creation without getting the 'fuzziness' of some component parts of Golden.
I am NOT looking for a publishing deal with a traditional tarot publisher though, as that would restrict the primary purpose for which I'm making the deck - ie for digital delivery (phone, web and perhaps other things...).
The reason I am making it primarily for digital delivery is pretty much the same reason that US screenwriters are on strike. Creators deserve to make a decent living from the popularity of their creations, and with digital distribution the overheads are much lower - and yet the traditional media are not sharing that potential profit with creators.
Think of it this way... I have amazing, dedicated fans who I really love. But if they buy my deck and look after it, treasure it and pass it on to their grandchildren - I probably made maybe 50c (or as low as 20c) from that relationship. Since tarot isn't on the scale of mass-market novels, then the chances of me making a living in a traditional model is nil, regardless of how popular my deck is.
So... I would rather have, say, 10c every time someone chose to use my deck on tarot.com and paid their $6.95 for a reading. That's still a very small %, and the amount I got would depend on the ongoing popularity of my deck - as long as people continued to USE it (as opposed to a traditional model where there's just a one-off payment when they buy it) then I could continue to earn a living from it, and also support myself to produce new work as well.
It's not that I'm a money-grubbing greedy so-and-so, it's just that I think creators deserve to get paid for their work the same as anyone else who does their job well.
Anyways, I'm back to the pixel-pushing and very excited about doing something creative. The Byte Me! Festival was a huge commitment of both time and money for the digital content community here in Western Australia and they responded pretty pathetically - so many people said they'd come along and then just didn't bother. So from now on, I'm just working on my own projects and those with Jasper. And Tarot Cielo is at the top of that list!
I know a digital deck won't suit everyone, especially the traditionalists who prefer treestock over pixels - so I will make sure that there's at least a small run of 'real' decks. It won't be possible to make it like Golden (I don't think US Games would probably ever spend that much on producing a deck again anyway! Talk about expensive production for the price...) but I've had several offers to publish the deck by small, independant publishers in the US, who would allow me to retain full digital rights. Tarot.com claims to have over a million users, so my guess is that there are many people for whom a digital deck is fine and dandy - let alone all of the people whose mobile never leaves their hand!